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Vocation has a new look!
17 September 2021
Vocation, one of the UK’s largest and fastest-growing craft beer breweries, is rebranding its entire range. The new designs bring more personality to the packaging and better reflect the distinct character of each beer inside. The Vocation name also features more prominently, allowing consumers to identify the brand more easily and enable better trial across its ever-expanding, innovative portfolio of beers.
The new designs highlight Vocation’s bold flavours and uncompromising quality, using bright colours to help differentiate the individual beers while carefully maintaining the brand’s strong craft sensibility. A new ‘Vocation V’ brand icon has been introduced to add interest and easier identification of Vocation beers.
Brand design agency Robot Food designed the new branding and has been Vocation’s design partner since 2015. The newly branded range is available across most retailers in 330ml and 440ml cans and the on-trade – on draught and cans. New point-of-sale material, including branded beer runners, parasols, and glassware, is also available to all on-trade customers.
John Hickling, founder and CEO of Vocation Brewery, says: “As a brewery, we have quietly gone about our business since 2015 in a beer-focused way, not making big noise or banging the drum. What started as my vocation soon evolved to be the vocation of our small but dedicated team, who all have real pride in the beers that we produce.
“We’re now growing at 65% year-on-year, and have a wide and varied core range as well as producing specials and seasonals. Our flagship Life & Death beer is now one of the best-selling beers in the craft aisle, representing around 30% of our production, yet people don’t know about us. The rebrand is about the maturity and growing confidence of the brand, to shout a little louder and make sure everyone knows about Vocation. It’s simply about wanting to get better beer to more people.”
Rick Stenson, managing director for Vocation Brewery, continues: “For us, it is all about the beer. To honour our beers, we want the best clothes we can buy them. We want them to look as good as possible because we care so much about them. It’s also important to keep the designs fresh and interesting, best reflect what’s inside, and keep us at the forefront of the craft beer market. The liquid inside remains the same; we’ve just treated them to a new outfit.
“We’re stronger now in the supermarkets now than we have ever been, which is testament to our hard-working team and the first-rate beers we produce. The big focus for us now is to turn to the on-trade as it starts to recover and open up, and respond to the demand for craft beer in pubs and restaurants. Over the last 18 months we have gained an extremely strong online following through our web sales. We have also gained significant inroads with our export market, with our beers now available in 50 countries around the world.”
Vocation Brewery is an independent craft brewery based in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, founded in 2015 by John Hickling, with just himself, a rebuilt chicken shed and a dog for company. Today the brewery has 60 staff and sells the equivalent of 10 million cans per year. They’ve come a long way, but it’s still their vocation.
To get your hands on the new branded beers, look out for our weekly craft beer updates and email an order to sales@inn-express.com or call us on 01789 488008.